Plans are afoot to release pigeons equipped with cellphones and GPS so that they can ‘blog’ air pollution data.
Although this evokes images of the remote controlled penguin bombers in Batman Returns, the folk at the University of California’s Digital Arts Research Network are apparently deadly serious. The plan is the work of Beatriz da Costa and will form part of the inter-Society for Electronic Arts’ annual symposium in San Jose this August.
“We are combining an air pollution sensor with a home-made cellphone,” da Costa told New Scientist. The team is planning to fit all the necessary components onto a single board small enough for the birds to carry in a backpack. The data they send back will be displayed on the blog in the form of an interactive map.
As the post on Slashdot notes, da Cosa has form in this area with work on RFID roaches. Whilst we applaud their initiative, we can imagine how the blog would read could those rats-with-wings actually type:
woke up, ate some sick…
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